


Etched into my Skin

by writewithurheart



Category: Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, F/M, Multi, Soulmarks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-24 07:22:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13208793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writewithurheart/pseuds/writewithurheart
Summary: Every person in the world has a mark upon their skin, a mark that points them to their other half. The mark is gold until a person meets their other half and it turns into a black tattoo.But it isn't all that cut and dry. These marks are twisted to define the social order, to divide the populace as much as unite them. Having a soulmark isn't easy when society places restrictions on who you can love or which marks are acceptable.Gertrude Yorkes knows her soulmate, but life's a little too complicated for them right now, what with their parents being murders. Karolina Dean has other problems, the least of which being that she has two soulmarks. Chase Stein might be in love with his soulmate...maybe...unless she's not his soulmate...Nico Minoru really wishes her mark wasn't so easily hidden because maybe then she could find her soulmate. And Alex Wilder, well, Alex's found something, something that starts a chain reaction and sends the gang on a journey that will change everything.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, lovely readers! 
> 
> Here's another little idea that popped into my head and I couldn't resist writing it. I always loved the Runaways Comics and the tv show just might be my new favorite. So I hope you enjoy this fic! Please, please, let me know what you think!

**A Soulmate AU**

Gertrude Yorkes ran her hand over the concealed mark on her torso. It burns the closer she gets to home as if it knows she’s nearing the bearer of the other half of the mark, to her soulmate. She shifts in the backseat to cover the nervous habit as her parents continue to prattle on about what she missed while she was visiting her birth mother in Spain. She was gone for three months, sent away for the duration of the summer for some inexplicable reason. All she knows is one day she was finding her birth mother and the next her parents sent her away to a foreign country. They stayed with her for the first three weeks before they were called back to California. 

“Molly’s coming back tomorrow,” Stacy Yorkes says over her shoulder, twisting to face Gertrude in the backseat. 

Gert offers a strained smile to her mom. Her eyes land on the black soulmark on her mother’s wrist. Her father grabs her hand to their marks line up and the smile at each other in a sappy move straight out of Molly’s Rom Coms. It makes her sick on the inside. 

Per the political propaganda, soulmarks lead you to the love of your life and then the two of you live happily ever after. They complete you, but it is a just a patriarchal, heteronormative practice, outdated and despicable because for all their hoorah about soulmarks, homosexual couples were still viewed as abominations, and anyone born without a soulmark or with more than one still found themselves ostracized.  

People’s value was directly attached to the marks on their skin. No rational human should support it. 

Of course, her views were largely disregarded by the rigid social structure. Her opinion was dismissed as the unsettled ramblings of naive child. She would “understand when she was older” or “when she finds her soulmate”. It seemed every time she opened her mouth, she was shut down. 

“I hope you don’t mind,” her father says, “but we had an emergency Pride meeting, so we’re going straight to the Wilders.” 

Straight to Murder Club. Gert sighs. “Great.” 

“It will be fun, Gertie. You’ll get to see all your friends.” 

It’s a banal comment, a throwaway remark. In reality, it’s been years since any of them had been truly close. Gert had only been close with Nico, Molly, and Chase. Amy, Alex and Karolina hadn’t had much in common with her. She and Nico had similar hang-ups about  soulmates. Molly was her sister, and Chase...well, they had a reparte that was as wonderful as it was unlikely. He always presented himself as the dumb jock, yet he was one of the few people who could maintain a conversation with her. 

Then Chase had started playing high school sports, and they stopped hanging out. Apparently, being friends with chubby, short girls wasn’t something jocks did. Then Nico’s sister died and she cut herself off from the world and traded her pink and purple pens for copious eyeliner and ripped fishnets. 

Then again, to her parents, their group will always be besties until they’re all old and grey. 

Walking into the Wilders’ mansion is as awkward as it always is. She’s surrounded by the oppressive force of the Pride’s auras. It’s a physical presence calculated to intimidate. She used to just find it annoying before she found out about the Murder Cult that happens in the basement. 

She and Chase had stumbled upon it last year when they went looking for liquor. Well, Chase was looking for liquor. Gert just wanted to get away from Molly’s whining as she tried to get everyone to play twister with her. She hadn’t wanted to go down the creepy secret passageway, but Chase had just grinned at her and led the way. 

Gert shoves the memory down as she heads toward the guest house and game room where the rest of the group is waiting. Her mark is burning again. Her hands curl into fists to curb the urge to cover it with her hand. She summons a smile as she enters the room. 

“Hola!” Four faces turn to stare. She tries not to notice that Nico and Alex are practically wrapped around each other and that Karo and Chase are on the other side of the room, equally as ensconced in privacy. Apparently, she’s playing the fifth wheel tonight. “Don’t bother getting up. I have some sleep to catch on. Don’t mind me.” 

She flops down on a couch, stuffs a pillow behind her head and shuts her eyes deliberately. 

Whispers flit around the room from the two couples, but the words are too muffled for her to comprehend more than a word here or there. Gert rolls on her side, turning into the back of the couch. Even though she hadn’t been tired when she walked in, Gertrude finds herself nodding off as the voices rise from a whisper. 

The last thing she remembers is the weight of a soft blanket covering her before she succumb to sleep. 

…

The last thing Karolina wants is to be here. 

She’s got enough on her plate without having to hang out with the other Pride kids. When she tried to talk to her parents about it, their response was laughter and a: 

“This isn’t the movies, Kare-bear! People aren’t born with two soulmarks. And if they were, its not like the government kills them.” 

Karolina rubs a hand over her hip with a groan. That had been absolutely no help. Because her parents existed in a Hollywood bubble where nothing bad ever happened and everything was wonderful. They were the sickening poster children of loving soulmates. Kare had been proud of that once.

Then she figured out she had two soulmarks. 

One the gold of an unfound other half. 

The other was inky black. 

The swirling designs on her shoulder were the marks everyone focuses on. They’re visible and gorgeous, completely worthy of the daughter of movie stars. She would add a dusting of glitter to make it pop at movie premieres, a couple shirts with cut outs to really flaunt it. 

She’d been obsessed with the idea of her soulmate, the romance of it all. 

But it was all hiding a secret. 

For some inexplicable reason, Karolina’s parents had never found her second soulmark, the one high on her thigh. It’s small, a thin black line that ends in a circle with little squiggles coming off it, like a sun. It’s been black for as long as she can remember, which always confused her. 

Kare hasn’t been romantically interested in anyone, not before a couple months ago. That was when she had seriously contemplated the symbol. She started to ponder it, wonder where it had came from,  who it connected her to. 

Then she had been dragged to her first Pride meeting in a year. 

“Think they’re soulmates?” 

Karolina jerks her gaze away from Nico and Alex where they sit cuddled across the room,  guilty at being caught. She forces her body to turn away from the giggling couple. It feels like a painful shift, bringing her attention back to Chase Stein, the only other awake member of tonight’s party. 

“What?” 

He frowns at her. “Nico and Alex. Think they’re soulmates?” 

“Uh…” She sure hopes not. The hidden mark that’s always covered with clothes: she thought Nico might have the other half inked into her skin. It wouldn’t be visible, not in public, not ever. So she can hope. At least until its confirmed otherwise. 

“Not that it matters,” Chase adds, voice bitter. “At our age it’s not like we’re going to be unfailingly loyal to people we haven’t met yet.”  

Karolina smiles tightly, wondering what she can say in response to that. Nico shouldn’t be her soulmate for so many reasons. Karolina never thought she would care about Gert’s rants on homophobia and the inherent flaws in the soulmate system. And now she finds herself in a position where she not only has  _ two _ soulmates but also likes girls. 

So much for being the perfect daughter. 

“So what? You think we should just make out?” Karolina challenges. She’d not attracted to him in the slightest. He might be the star of the lacrosse team or whatever, that she’s heard other girls whisper and giggle about, but Chase will always be just a friend. 

Chase blinks at her. Kare bites back a smile when his eyes flicker from her to Gert, sleeping on the couch, and back. He shakes it off easily enough and turns back to her. He shifts. “Sure. Let’s do this.” 

Kare laughs and pushes him away from her. “In your dreams, Stein.” 

He laughs good-naturedly and falls back into the couch. “You did offer.” 

She shakes her head and stands. “How about we go for a swim?” 

“I just gotta do one thing first.” He grabs a blanket and shakes it before settling it over Gertrude’s sleeping form. 

They could be soulmates, Gert and Chase. Karolina sees it when they interact, that they care for each other. However, the way Chase acts, it’s like he’s never met his soulmate. He flirts, he parties. He acts like he doesn’t have a care for his soulmate. 

But he cares for Gert, that much is clear. 

And he watches Kare’s back, even though they’re not together. 

She shakes her head and starts for the Wilder’s pool. She carefully ensures the bathing suit she brought covers her second soulmark and dives into the pool. It’s peaceful for a moment under the water. She can pretend the world doesn’t exist, that it isn’t twisted to discriminate against those who are different. 

Breath fills her lung as she breaks the surface of the water. Two soulmarks...what’s so wrong about that? 

If only she could ask Nico if she has the matching one… 

Karo sinks back under the water. 

_ If only _ ...

...

“Your soul mark. It’s black.” 

Chase flinches at Karolina’s words, his hand moving to cover the mark over his ribs. It looks like a clock with couple visible gears. It’s developed as he aged, shifting either the time or sometimes the gears. That’s unusual, from what he’s researched. Marks appear on your skin sometime in your first four years. They’re gold until you meet your soulmate, and then your marks turn black.

Chase doesn’t remember a time before it was black. His parents had been startled when it appeared already inky black a week before his fifth birthday. It meant, he’d already met his soulmate. Being a social child who travelled with his parents when they went on business trips,  Chase hadn’t the slightest clue to his soulmate. The mark itself was supposed to be a clue, but Chase was at a loss. His father was content to wait until he was eighteen so they could let one of the many mark databases match him with his soul mate. Chase can’t help but think that it’s someone who’s still in his life. 

“Guess that means I’ve already met my match.” Chase pulls his shirt back on, no longer interested in going for a swim, which had been the original plan. He doesn’t like to talk about it.

Karolina frowns at him where she floats in the middle of the water. “I guess I just assumed you hadn’t...Isn’t that a good thing?” 

“Supposedly. Problem is, I don’t know who she is.” He used to hope it was Karolina. Until he saw swirling marks that cover the space between her shoulder blades, almost like wings, black as his were. 

“You don’t? Not even a little inkling?”

She’s trying to lead him somewhere, but Chase isn’t biting. He fidgets and crosses his arms. He stares blankly back at her.

“Well, what do you think she’s like?” 

Chase snorts. “I try not to think about it.” He’s a liar, a liar with a capital L. Whenever he looks at the tattoo, all he can picture is a short girl with brilliant purple hair and an equally sharp tongue, the same girl he kissed three years ago while their parents were in a Pride meeting because she was terrified about her first kiss being horrible despite a rousing rant against the patriarchy. The girl currently passed out on the Wilders’ couch that he can barely see from his spot by the pool. 

“Try not to think about what?” Alex asks as he and Nico join them. 

“Soulmates,” Karo shoots back with a grin. “Chase’s mark is black.” 

Chase rolls his eyes. “Thanks, Kare.” 

“I didn’t know you’d met your soulmate,” Nico says. She walks over and pokes him. “Come on, let’s see it.” 

“What? No!” Chase crosses his arms over his chest. “It’s none of your business.” 

“Oh, please!” Nico flops into the chair beside him, her eyes narrowed on him as if she could suddenly develop x-ray vision and see through his shirt. “What have you got to hide?” 

“Alright, then, let’s see yours.” 

He grins triumphantly as Nico backs down. 

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Chase continues. “Just because you’ve got a soulmate doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy.” 

“Chase…” Karo says softly, swimming over toward him, sympathy in her voice, almost pity…

He shakes his head. He’s not alone because he thinks Gert doesn’t like him. He’s alone because he’s afraid he’ll turn into his father, that he can’t be happy without hurting the people he loves. “It’s fine. I’m fine. These marks don’t matter anyway.” 

He kicks a rock as he walks away from the pool, into the dark and back toward the meeting room. Gert is still sleeping on the couch, snuggled into the blanket he placed over her, mouth open and snoring slightly. 

It’s Gert. 

The floor in front of the couch is cool as he sits, his back against the couch. He glances at her purple hair and fights the urge to run his hand over it. Last time he tried to  broach the subject with her, Chase and Gert had stumbled upon a murder cult. Nothing like witnessing a murder to ruin the mood. 

Chase closes his eyes and breathes deeply. With Gert, he feels at peace. That’s all he needs. 

… 

Alex elbows Nico, and gestures in the direction Chase stormed off in. “What’s his problem?” 

Nico shrugs and turns to Karolina for an explanation. 

“He didn’t want to talk about it,” Kare explains with a shrug. 

“But you saw his mark?” Nico spins to Kare, fascinated. “What did it look like?’ 

Truly, it’s remarkable that their entire group has been friends since they were in diapers and none of them have seen each other’s marks. Nico had just assumed they were in awkward spots, like her own, spots that you never revealed in public. Well, except Kare’s,  which was a swirl of gold all over her  shoulder. It’s a pity. She wouldn’t  have minded being matched with Kare. 

Kare shrugs. “If he didn’t want to share…” 

Well,  Nico already knew it wasn’t a match for hers, not if Chase could show it without exposing himself. It was on his chest somewhere. It had to be. She can’t think of a time Chase ever walked around without a shirt on. It’s the only thing that makes sense. 

“What does he have to be scared of? So what if anyone sees it?” Nico pulls off her platform boots and tosses them to the side so  she can stick her feet into the pool. The water is cool, soothing. She really doesn’t get Chase. “He’s the golden boy. Sure, he’s not the smartest, but he’s hot. You’ve heard the girls at school, even some of the boys, mooning over him.” 

“You think he’s hot?” Alex asks. 

Nico glances between Alex and Karolina. “Well, objectively speaking. He’s not my type.” 

Both Alex and Kare relax. Nico kicks her feet in the water, not paying attention to their reactions. Chase has only ever been a blip on the edge of her radar, a friend, someone she used to know. She never spared him a thought aside from commiseration about how awful their parents were. 

“Don’t you think it’s odd?” Alex asks suddenly. He sits beside Nico on the lip of the pool. For a moment, he pauses to roll his pants up. “That none of us have seen his mark before? I mean, I’ve only seen Kare’s and Molly’s.” 

Nico’s eyes drift to the gold swirl on Kare’s shoulder and then sideways to Alex. There’s a chance he has her mark in the same inky black complexion, just hidden from view. He’s staring back at her, just as curious. 

She narrows at him. “Whoa. Nope. Nuh-uh. That’s private.” 

Alex raises his eyebrows, a smirk on his lips, eyes bright with unspoken challenge. Nico smiles back, brushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear before Karolina’s twinkling laughter ruins the moment. 

If they were alone Nico might have pursued the idea, to see if Alex had her mark. High on his hip, it would place them in a compromising position to expose it. Nico was willing. She’s been searching for someone with the same sunspear for years. Boys, girls, anyone. It was a small line with a sun on top. It was just difficult when your mark was so hidden. It’s not like she can just lift her shirt a bit to expose the mark. 

“I haven’t seen your mark either, Alex,” Kare responds from halfway across the pool. “And if you two are going to flirt, go somewhere else so I can enjoy my swim.” 

Nico grimaces. There’s that bitter tone that she abhors. “Sorry, Kare.” 

Alex pushes his glasses up his nose. “Why don’t I go get us some snacks?” 

Nico responds to his small smile with one of her own. She likes this. The casual flirting, the simple joys of  _ talking _ to someone she likes. She likes the reparte. He smiles at her, gets her coffee, helps her hack into her mother’s secure network so she can investigate her sister’s death. Alex had always been more like Amy, with their video games and computer hacking. And then Alex had approached the group about hanging out during Pride meetings again. 

And they had started looking into her sister’s supposed suicide. 

“So, I’m guessing your mark is black?” 

Nico blinks. Kare was across the pool a moment ago and now she’s surfaced right alongside Nico. “Um…” 

Kare shrugs. “Just color me curious.” 

“Yeah,” Nico admits, eyes drawn to the sweep of Karolina’s blonde hair, all slicked back and gorgeous. She shakes her head. “It’s black, but it’s covered all the time. I can’t just whip it out in public and compare notes with people.” 

Karolina laughs, a glorious tinkling sound that always makes Nico smile. “Sounds frustrating.” 

It must be Nico’s imagination that Karolina’s eyes dart to exactly where her mark is. There’s no way Kare could know. She shifts to throw off her growing suspicion. “Hey, at least you don’t have to worry about that.” 

Kare frowns. “What?”  

Nico points to her shoulder, where the mark glints in the low light. Kare seems surprised by her own mark on her skin. “Oh, right, well...actually…” 

“Nico! Karolina! You are not gonna believe what I just found!” Alex comes racing around the corner, a huge smile on his face. “Grab Gert and Chase! They’re going to want to see this!” 

“See what?” Nico asks, surprised by just how excited Alex is, jumping from foot to foot in jittery anticipation. 

“I found secret passages!” 

Nico tilts her head. She has a bad feeling about this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back by popular demand! This has not been beta'd and I have no idea where this is going, but here's the next chapter:

**Chapter 2**

Torture. This is torture. 

Karolina trudges along behind Alex and Nico, watching them exchange light touches in the dark hallway. Honestly, it’s just her luck to fall in lo- No. Not that. This isn’t that. This is a crush, an extremely unfortunate crush seeing as she has no hints whatsoever that Nico likes girls...well...that’s not true, she reflects. 

That moment by the pool, talking about soulmarks. Kare is almost positive that Nico’s mark could match hers. After all,  it would be hidden and there had definitely been some looks. Kare smiles to herself as she brushes her wet hair back from her face. 

Kare glances back over her shoulder to Chase. Perhaps he can reassure her that it’s not all in her head, that Nico might love her. In the dark of the tunnel, backlit by the tunnel opening behind them, Gert and Chase appear to have merged as one. She’s not leaning on him but she might as well be as they share agitated glances. 

It’s not the lovey-dovey, adventure vibes she’s getting off Nico and Alex. It’s something else, something more. Kare falls back,  momentarily distracted from her soulmate questions. 

“Okay, what’s up?” 

Gert’s mouth snaps shut and she shrugs. “Nothing much, just wish I had more time to sleep.” Curtly she speeds up until she’s closer to Nico and Alex, forcing the couple to put a little more space between them. 

Kare falls into step with Chase. “Was it something I said?”  

Chase sighs, running a hand over the back of his neck. “Nah. Gert’s just a little wound up.” 

“About what? She scared of the dark or something?” Kare doesn’t buy it. There’s something Chase and Gert are hiding. She doesn’t know what, but it just convinces her that there’s something between them, possibly even a matching mark. 

“We found these tunnels before,” Chase admits, voice tense, eyes flitting here and there. “A year ago. It wasn’t these exact tunnels, but if they lead where I think…” 

Karolina takes a deep breath as his words trail off. The walls around them seem creepier now, a astounding feat as the tunnel wasn’t all that friendly to begin with. Now the shadows are sinister. They swallow Nico, Alex, and Gert just steps ahead. “How bad could it be? So we see our parents debating charities to support this year. It’s not like the Wilders have skeletons in the  basement, right?” 

She laughs at her own jest. It trails off quickly when Chase gives her a warning look. 

“Seriously? Skeletons?” 

Chase takes a deep breath and starts walking again. Kare hadn’t even realized they had stopped. “Let’s pray they’re talking charities and not what Gert and I saw last time.” 

Yeah, cause that doesn’t sound menacing at all. She jogs to catch up to him. Trepidation threatens to overwhelm her, to throw her into a fit of worry over what they will find at the end of the tunnel, so she shifts topics. 

“Why can’t you just admit that Gert is your soulmate?” 

Chase trips over his own feet and Kare covers her mother to suffocate a giggle. “Wha? Why would you say that?” 

She raises an eyebrow, as if he could question her infallible logic. 

“You’re wrong,” he says. The words must sound hollow to his own ears as well because he sighs and adds. “I was going to ask her the last time we were in these tunnels. And then...well, you’ll see.” 

Kare follows his gesture to a large window in the wall. Gert makes eye contact with Chase as Karolina pushes past her to hear Alex explain: 

“It’s one way glass. They can’t see us.” 

Kare presses close to Nico. The bare skin of her arm brushes Nico’s, sending a thrill of electricity through her, and it takes Kare a moment to focus on the scene in front of her, to truly understand it. “What the…” 

.... 

A cult. 

Her parents are part of a cult. 

Nico shakes her head as her mind races in a desperate attempt to find another reason for all their parents to be dressed up in long red robes, in a circle, chanting. There’s a large book on a pedestal, a staff in her mother’s hand, and literal rainbows coming off Leslie Dean. 

Karolina’s hand curls around her wrist, fingers digging in. Nico twists her hand around so their fingers are intertwined without thinking. Her hand buzzes with familiarity at the contact. 

“Guys,” Alex whispers, his hand grabbing Nico’s other one, making her feel strangely torn between the two people beside her. 

There’s movement. 

Leslie Dean loses her rainbow as she walks over to an alcove and comes back with a young woman dressed in a matching scarlet robe, one she’s never seen before. To her right, Karolina gasps, and whispers a name. Further down, Gert holds up her cell phone, pointing it at the window. Chase hovers behind her. 

Nico focuses back on the room, chokes back a gasp as her parents help pull the robe from the young woman’s shoulders. It slithers to the ground and the woman starts to fight their grip. Nico starts forward, eager to help, as if she could prevent this. 

Alex and Karolina hold her back, their held hands now acting as grips to prevent her from moving forward. Karolina must sense what’s coming next because she turns and wraps Nico in a hug as Geoffrey Wilder steps forward and plunges a dagger into the woman’s chest. 

The scream is torn from her throat before Nico can think better of it, and the next thing she knows, they’re running. Her breath comes in gasps, her steps unsteady in her platform heels. Footsteps too loud. 

_ We need to go.  _

_ Where?  _

_ Turn here.  _

_ No!  _

_ This way. _

The others are talking in frantic voices barely above a whisper, but Nico can’t make sense of anything. Its all just movement and sounds until they land back in the game room and Gert throws down a white sheet of colorful dots. 

“Quick, everyone, take off your shoes.” 

Nico acts, not comprehending until Kare grabs her and pushes her at the board. “Put a foot on red.” 

She ends up pressed between Kare and Alex once again, her mark a faint burn as she attempts to remain stable. She’s still breathing hard, heart racing as Gert takes the first spin. With each movement, Nico relaxes just a bit more, settling into the rhythm. 

Then a door opens. 

Nico’s head jerks around. 

“Hey, Mom.” 

How does Alex manage to stay so calm when the image of Geoffrey stabbing a knife into a girl’s heart is engraved on the inside of Nico’s eyelids every time she blinks? She summons something that must pass for a smile because no one questions it, even as Gert’s left hand moves to blue and they all collapse in a pile of arms and legs. 

A flare from her mark has Nico gasping for breath. 

“Oh, sorry,” Alex exclaims, rolling off her, hands hovering as if to make sure she’s okay. 

Nico grimaces as she slowly its up. There’s never been such and intense flare of sensation from her soulmark before. She stares at Alex, wide-eyed as his eyebrows draw inward. 

“You okay?” 

She nods and sits up, taking deep breaths until the echoed burning of her mark settles into something more manageable. Alex’s hand rests on her back, rubbing in circles, while Karolina hovers as if she wants to offer comfort but can’t figure out how. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Kare whispers. 

“I’m fine,” Nico insists, shrugging both Alex and Karolina off. Now that the shock has run out, Nico needs to do something. She’s not sure what, so she starts to pace, chewing on her thumb. “Did your mom suspect...anything?” 

Alex shakes his head. “No, but the rest of our parents will be out soon. We can’t talk about this now. We’ll meet later. For now,  we just need to act normal.” 

“Normal?” Nico’s voice jumps a couple octaves as she fights to keep it from getting so loud that any approaching parents might hear. “We just watched our parents  _ kill _ someone, and you want us to act normal?” 

She spins around for support. Gert and Chase look apprehensive, but accepting. Alex looks pained, Karolina nervous. 

“Maybe they didn’t murder her?” Karolina offers. 

Nico makes a face. She doesn’t even sound convinced of her own idea. 

“Yeah, I’m sure the stabbing was just a friendly welcome,” Gert cuts in with her usual snark. 

“We can talk about this later.” Chase elbows Gert and shoots her a look of some significance. “For now, let’s keep quiet. Act normal.” 

Karolina fidgets with her bracelet, her expression at least mirroring the uncertainty and worry Nico feels. Their eyes meet, a moment of total understanding that suspends them, an instant of camaraderie that allows Nico to ground herself, to center her thinking and focus on the lie they’re going to tell their parents. 

“Alright. Act normal. I can do that.” 

… 

Chase squeezes her arm before he leaves with his parents. Gertrude’s eyes meet his in that moment, a silent agreement that they’re together in this. Despite the distance between them since they last witnessed what really happens at a Pride meeting, they’re still on the same side. Her mark tingles pulses in contentment at the contact. 

Gert squeezes back while they part ways. She trudges behind her parents, fighting a yawn. She really is tired. 

Her phone weighs like a brick in her pocket,  actual physical proof of what Pride really is: murderers. Last time, she had been in shock, she had turned away into Chase’s shoulder, crying silent tears. She had been shell-shocked. 

This time she was smarter. They now had proof to bring the police and Gert didn’t have to worry about keeping Molly safe from their parents. She’ll have to wait until  Molly returns too, so they can leave together. 

“How was the meeting?” Gert forces herself to ask as she stares out the window. 

“Nevermind that, honey,” Stacey says. She twists around to face Gert. “Tell us all about Spain?” 

Dale grins. “Yes! Tell us everything.” 

It’s perfectly mundane conversation, as if they didn’t just get through murdering an innocent girl. Innocuous. That’s the best word for it, Gert decides as she babbles about her experience in Spain, about the one boy she went on a date with who was a sexist pig, the girl who spent the whole day showing her Madrid. 

The whole time, Gert grips her phone tightly where it sits in her pocket. It’s been a year and she still has trouble grasping that her parents - the same people who make their own cheese and only have protein shakes for breakfast - murder someone once a month. They’re vegetarian, for goodness sake. They recycle everything. 

Gert’s phone buzzes. She fumbles with it desperately until she gets a look at Alex’s text: 

**Meet at the James Dean Memorial** .  **10pm**

She rolls her eyes and shoves the phone back into her pocket. “Ana took me to Mass every week. The Vatican was cool, and I tried to tell her we were Jewish but she kept trying to feed me bacon. Definitely not kosher. Or vegetarian. And Agnostic apparently doesn’t translate well. I learned a good deal about the intricacies of organized religion and why I’m never going to be Catholic despite Ana’s best attempts.” 

“You know, dear, if you wanted to go to Mass, we would happily take you. You could go with Molly and her aunt…” 

Gert laughs. “No thank you. I have no desire to ascribe to those outdated and asinine rituals.” 

Dale and Stacey exchange looks, sappy looks and Gert fights another roll of her eyes. 

“I remember the rant you went on before your bat mitzvah,” Dale reminisces with a smile. “That was the first rant we heard on organized religion.” 

“She was so cute!” Stacey grins back at Gert. “So fierce. You scared the Rabbi, and I knew we had raised a bright young woman.” 

And her parents are lost again. Gert sighs. Her hand runs over her mark. By tonight, they’ll have turned their parents in. At the very least, they won’t be coming back home to murderers. Her and Molly will already be packed. They can take her beat up car, converted to not use fossil fuel. 

Gert shifts. One more night, and maybe this whole thing will finally be over. 

… 

Chase’s bags are already packed.  They’ve been packed since he was twelve and his father started hitting him regularly, even though he never had the courage to actually do it. The bag is sitting in the back of his van, ready when he is. 

He closes his phone after he sees Alex’s text. Now he has a meeting spot and a time. All he has to do is bide his time, and when the moment is right, grab his fistigons and get out of here. He could probably snag a couple more of his father’s unfinished gadgets. He’s gotten quite good at fixing them when his father can’t. If he could stomach to spend time with his father, then he might be even better. 

But his relationship with his father was broken long ago. 

Chase lies back on his bed, a hand resting against his mark over his shirt. He hadn’t been prepared when Kare brought it up tonight. He should have expected it. He was usually so careful about taking off his shirt in front of people, since he was ten and realized not everyone had black marks, that his mark was unique. 

Unique just like Gert. 

He pulls out his phone and pans to her contact information. The picture is a candid, one snapped while Gert was blissfully unaware, deep in thought over a book. She had caught him taking the picture when the phone had clicked, but she’d let him keep it. Called him a creep. Told him he was lucky she liked it. 

Sleep drags him under for an hour,  a power nap before his phone wakes him up to flurry of texts between Alex, Nico and Karolina. Gert hasn’t contributed while the three banter back and forth. Honestly, Chase is having trouble keeping up with who’s flirting with whom at this point. 

He slips from the bed and walks from the room. Each step is placed with care, long familiar with the boards that creak in this house. He’s snuck out more times than he can count. The tricky part is sneaking into the basement. His father is just as apt to stay up all night working as he is to fall asleep early. 

The Fistigons are exactly where he left them on the counter, the x-ray goggles beside them. 

He grabs them both, stuffing them in an extra duffel bag. He grabs tools, work gloves, some spare wires, anything that could possibly be useful. He’s almost out of the garage when he realizes the basement is soundproof. It’s had to be with his father’s constant tampering and experiments. 

Chase tosses his duffel into the back of the van and pulls out the baseball bat that’s been sitting there since last season. He swings the bat around a couple times, adjusting to the feel of it in his hands. 

The first computer smashes to the ground, cracks into pity pieces. Chase laughs at the sound, satisfied at breaking something his father considers more dear than his own son. The monitor is next. Then another. Then a second computer. Then the glass wall. 

When he’s done, the garage is in ruins. 

Chase tosses his bat into the back of his van and drives away without looking back. No matter what happens now, he’s not coming back. There will be no looking back, just moving forward. Chase takes a deep breath as he hits the open road. 

Then he laughs.

He’s free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

“Huh? Where are we going?” Molly mumbles as she crawls out of her bed, rubbing her eyes. “I just got home.”

They’re already late, which would have vaguely worried Gert if Molly had gotten home any earlier. She wasn’t about to leave Molly with potential murders, even if they were her loving parents. She’d only gone to Spain after making sure Molly was away from her parents as well. “We’re meeting up with the rest of the gang. Now, shhhh. We don’t want Stacey and Dale to hear us.” 

Molly nods groggily, too tired to question it as they slip through the garage to the driveway and to Gert’s old junker that her parents converted to run on compost. All her attempts to remain quiet are ruined when the engine roars to life as she turns the key. She pauses for a moment, eyes glued to the house for any sign of life. When all the lights stay off, Gert eases the dinosaur into drive and they’re on their way. 

She wishes she had gotten more sleep at the Wilders or that she didn’t have to drive. Molly’s head rests against the window, quiet snores fill the car as Gert pulls into the mostly-empty observatory parking lot. She can’t see the James Dean statue from here, but she thinks she might see Chase’s van. Or it could be any other white van. 

“Wakey wakey, Molls,” Gert whispers, shaking her gently. 

“Huh?” She jerks upright and Gert nods out the window. 

“We’re here.” 

“Where’s here?” Gert is already halfway out of the car, so Molly follows without an answer, turning to rest her arms on top of the car as she stares at Gert. “What are we doing here?” 

The gold of Molly’s mark glints in the streetlight overhead. It covers nearly half her face with a spider web of jagged edges that disappear into her hairline. It reminds Gert of impact craters and is easily the most visible soulmark Gert has seen. 

“The Observatory. We’re meeting the gang at the James Dean statue.” With a pat, she confirms her cell phone rests in its spot in her pocket. “We’re late.” 

“The gang?” Molly yawns again. “So Chase, Karolina, Nico, and Alex? Didn’t you see them earlier?” 

“Yeah, but we saw something tonight…” Gert trails off. She doesn’t want to do this now, doesn’t want to pop the bubble that will disillusion Molly, her little sister. It’s instinct to protect her. “I’ll explain when we get there.” 

Molly narrows her eyes. “You’re not dragging me along to hook up with Chase, are you?” 

“What? No!” Gert twists her face into a disgusted glare as her cheeks heat in embarrassment. As expected of a little sister, Molly just smiles smugly and starts skipping. 

“You can try to hide it all you want, but I’ve seen the way you look at him.” 

“The way...I don’t look at him.” They both know the words are a bald-faced lie. Molly doesn’t even bother with a rebuttal except to look at her pointedly. “Anyway, he’s got a thing for Karolina.” 

Molly rolls her eyes, tugging her hat further down over her ears. “If you say so.” 

Gertrude does tell herself that. She has to. Because it hurts less to think he’s interested in someone else than to consider that he could be her soulmate who rejected her. Or the infinite hope that maybe his mark matches hers. 

“Let’s just find everyone else.” 

As predicted, everyone else is already there, arguing about whether or not they should go to the police as she and Molly walk up. The mention of police wake Molly up and frowns. 

“Why are we going to the police?” 

“You brought Molly?” Karolina says loudly as she turns to them, eyes wide with panic. 

Gert shrugs, trying not to be offended by the accusation in Karolina’s voice. “I figured this involved her too.” 

“She’s too young to deal with this.” 

“Hey!” Molly says. “I’m plenty old enough.” 

“Actually, I agree with Kare,” Nico puts in with an apologetic shrug. “Molly’s just about to start high school. She’s still just a kid.” 

“So I should have left her at home, with two people we’re about to turn into the police for murder? Yeah, that sounds like a great idea, guys.” Gert crosses her arms over her chest. 

“I agree with Gert. Molly should be here.” 

Gert relaxes a hair as Chase throws his arm over Molly’s shoulders with an easy grin. That cheerful charm which oozes from him works as always to soothe the group that might have broken out into a heated debate if he hadn’t intervened. Gert both hates him for the ease with which he wields that smile, and loves him for defending Molly. 

“Come on, Bruiser,” he says to Molly. “Let’s fill you in.” 

“Chase,” Karolina warns. 

He meets her eyes evenly. “She has a right to know.” 

“Alright,” she declares, “you guys are all acting weird. What’s happening?” 

“Uh,” the group glances around until Alex steps forward. 

“We...saw something tonight at the Pride meeting.” 

Molly rolls her eyes. “Yeah, they debated color scheme for the next gala?” 

“No.” Alex takes a deep breath. Gert steps forward to cut in, but Alex just plows forward. “We saw them kill someone.” 

The whole group holds their breath as they wait for Molly’s reaction. She blinks and looks around. “That’s not...no.” 

Gert’s hand lands on her shoulder. “Listen, Mols, I know it’s hard to understand-” 

“No. I just...I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t. Not Dale and Stacey.” 

“We saw it happen, Molly,” Karolina says softly. “There was a girl. And they were all there, all our parents. It might have been the first time?” 

Gert snorts, an unintentional reaction to Karolina’s naive optimism. She gets several glares in return, a frowny face from Molly, and Chase meets her gaze with a knowing grimace. Gert just shrugs. “I just think they wouldn’t have been quite so calm about it if it was their first kill. They knew what they were doing.” 

“You can’t know that Gert. My parents aren’t killers.” Karolina crosses her arms. 

Chase throws an arm around Gert’s shoulders. He leans into her and his body throwing off heat like a furnace. Her heart skips a beat at the contact, a distraction that almost causes her to miss his next words: 

“Well, I have no trouble believing my dad’s a killer. Mom’s a bit of a stretch, but still, it doesn’t surprise me.” Chase grins at her. 

Gert elbows him in the ribs. She distinctly remembers a time when he spent about three hours pacing and trying to come to terms with the discovery, a week when they both were trying to come up with excuses for what they saw, and then several months where they just avoided the topic and each other. 

“What was that?” 

Gert blinks and looks at Nico. “What?” 

“That! You two just shared a look.” 

… 

Nico bears down on her former best friend and the jock currently way too far into her personal space. Gert never let anyone close, not like that, yet here they were practically hanging off each other. If they weren’t soulmates, she was a purple hippo. 

“What do you know?” 

She knows that guilty look. Gert got the same look when she used to “liberate” Nico’s My Little Ponies by setting them free in the woods. 

“Gert and I have seen that ceremony before,” Chase admits, shifting a little anxiously. Gert nods in acknowledgement, a gesture that must tell him to continue,  because he does. “We found the passages last year.”

“And you didn’t say anything?” Alex asks, stepping up alongside Nico. 

Her eyes flit past him to land on Karolina who’s looking just as betrayed. “You what?” 

Gert brushes her hair behind her ear. “Well, we stumbled on the passages and decided to follow one.” She and Chase are practically merged into one person at this point. The two are either together or they’re idiots who have yet to figure out they’re soulmates. Sounds like Chase. She thought Gert was smarter than that. 

Who spends half their time with their soulmate and doesn’t realize they’re soulmates? 

“And you saw our parents commit murder?” Alex asks. 

Another shared glance. “Yeah,” Chase says. 

“But last time, it was my parents,” Gert confesses, locking eyes with Molly. “They drove that same dagger into the woman’s heart together.” 

“No!” Molly shouts. “No! I don’t believe it. This has to be some sort of...prank! Oh, haha punk the young kid. It’s not funny.” 

“It’s not meant to be funny, Mols,” Chase says, uncharacteristically serious. 

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Nico demands, still stuck on that little  _ monumental _ detail. 

Gert and Chase really need to stop giving each other those looks where it looks like they’re silently communicating. If they keep doing it, Nico might have to stab one of them with the heels of her incredibly high shoes. They’re stilettos that could slay a vampire. 

“We barely believed it. Would you have if you hadn’t seen it in person?” Gert defends. 

Nico scowls. “I’m still not sure I believe it.” She leans into he comforting hand on her shoulder. It soothes her, comforts her deep in her bones, eases tension she didn’t know she was carrying. “But you had no right to keep that from us.” Her eyes move to her left, to the owner of the comforting hand, surprised when her eyes land on Karolina and not Alex. Kare’s expressive blue eyes capture Nico’s, pull her in. 

“I don’t think it matters, guys. Not anymore.” Alex steps forward. “We saw it. We’re all in agreement. We need to contact the police. And evidence. Chase, do you know where your dad stashed the body?” 

… 

Chase jumps at the sounds of his name. He’d been distracted by the fall of Gert’s purple hair, the way she pushed her glasses up her nose as she followed the conversation, the fire in her green eyes. His body’s been humming with warm energy, with conviction that this is right since she arrived with Molly in tow. 

He looks over at Alex. “What?” 

“Your dad? The package he had us move? We need a body to show the police.” Alex says slowly, as if Chase is a dumb animal. He grimaces in Alex’s direction. 

“No. I don’t know where that creepy box went. It wasn’t in his car or in his lab.” 

“Great. So you couldn’t even bother to keep track of our one bit of evidence.” Alex sneers at him, as if has response had just solidified Alex’s opinion of him. 

“Lucky for all of us,” Gert interrupts, stepping between the two boys, “I have all the evidence we need.” 

Chase glares over her head at Alex. It’s admirable that she’s trying to deflate the situation, but as long as she stands at only 5 feet tall, she’s not much of a barrier. At least not for the angry looks being exchanged. 

He’s also pretty sure that Alex knows he won’t fight, not if Gert tells him not to. 

“What evidence?” Karolina asks, stepping closer to diffuse the situation. 

Gert - beautiful, intelligent,  _ genius _ Gert - pulls a phone from her pocket and waves it in their faces. “I have it on video.” 

Chase grins. That’s his girl. Well, not  _ his  _ girl because you can’t possess human beings and Gert would flay him if she ever heard that internal thought.  _ Besides _ , he reminds himself,  _ you don’t even know if she’s your soulmate _ . “Looks like we’ve got your evidence, Wilder. Looks like you’re up.” Five blank faces stare at him. He frowns. “What? Like that computer thing where you can anonymously send videos to the police or whatever.” 

Gert’s lips quirk in a smirk. “That’s it, Stein. Put those brain cells to work.” 

He winks back at her. “I’ve been known to have a good idea once in a while.” 

Alex scowls at him, as he takes the phone from Gert and watches the video before he looks up. “That’s great and all, but you do realize we can’t do this anonymously, right? They’re going to know we were the ones who took the video.” 

“Just make sure we have a separate copy before you send it to the police,” Nico cautions. 

Chase rolls his eyes at Alex. “Well, if we’re not leaving an anonymous tip,  then we should probably just call it in. Like talk to a detective and then send them the video directly.” Watching cop shows might actually come in handy. The girls are all nodding in agreement, even if Alex looks like he would shoot daggers into Chase given the first opportunity. 

Chase doesn’t really get it. They were never besties, but they used to play video games together once upon a time. When did he become Alex’s least favorite person in the gang? 

Alex pulls out his computer and Nico goes to hover by him. Karolina sighs and leans against the memorial statue of a man who bears her last name. She slides down the base to sit on the ground, staring up at the night sky. 

“You okay?” Chase asks. Gert has pulled Molly off to talk in heated whispers about what’s going on. He keeps an eye on them out of the corner of his eye as he kicks at the toe of Karolina’s sneaker to grab her attention. 

She lowers her blue eyes from the sky to meet his. “Did you really to through this a year ago?” 

He drops to the ground beside her. “Yeah. It was bad. You guys are all taking it better than I did.” If he hadn’t had Gert with him, he probably would have lost it. Heck, he’s still not sure he didn’t lose his mind. 

“How did you and Gert find the passages?” 

He smiles at the memory. “Those old arcade games Mr. Wilder has? We were playing with one of those and I thought it would be cool to explore.” 

Karolina glances at him now. “Why didn’t you grab the rest of us?” 

Chase laughs to cover his blushing cheeks and runs a hand through his hair. “Well...uh…” 

“Ah,” Kare says sagely. “You were trying to impress your soulmate.” 

Chase gulps at the word  _ soulmate _ . “She’s…” He means to deny it, but his eyes find Gert’s purple hair and he can’t do it. “I don’t know if it’s her or not.” 

Kare stills beside him. “You don’t? I see the two of you together and it’s pretty obvious.” 

Chase shrugs. “It feels right, you know? When I’m around her, it’s like we just understand each other. I feel more myself around her than anyone else, but I haven’t seen her mark. And I don’t think she’s seen mine.”

“How is that even possible? Your mark’s not small. Not to mention it’s relatively visible. Your teammates must have seen it in the locker room.” 

He didn’t want to have this conversation with Kare right now. Their parents are murderers and they’re turning into runaways and now he’s revealing how weird he is. “My mark hasn’t stayed the same. It’s been...changing. It settled a little over a year ago.” Almost eighteen months ago, to be exact. 

He watches her for the shock, the dismay, the frown of confusion, anything. 

Instead she perks up. “Really? It’s changed?” 

“You’re not freaked out? I tried to talk to my mom about it when I was little and she yelled at me and told me not to tell anyone, especially not my father.” He picks at a bit of lint on his jeans. “That was when I started covering the mark, so people wouldn’t ask questions when it changed.” 

Chase remembers the locker room talk over the years, the talk which turned lewd as they grew older and his friends cared less about a soulmate and more about sex. Soulmarks turned into something to get laid. He’d hated that. It had made him nauseous. It felt wrong to question his mark. 

“I have two,” Kare blurts out, shocking Chase for a whole different reason. Changing marks is unheard of, but he’s heard rumors about multiple marks. Of a teammate’s uncle’s brother-in-law twice removed or some such nonsense. All the cautionary tales spurn the idea of two marks because it means that person will destroy one of their mates when they make a choice. 

He looks Kare over, sees how she gnaws on her bottom lip and fiddles with her bracelet. “I know about the one on your shoulder,” he says, making conversation. “What’s the other one?” 

She takes a deep breath, her eyes staring across the way, drawn to something. 

Chase follows her gaze and the train of thought. 

“I think it’s Nico.” 

… 

Karolina stares at her goth goddess for a moment longer, admiring the way she absently brushes black hair back behind her ear as she leans over the laptop Alex pulled out. She’s not sure what Nico’s doing over there since she knows next to nothing about computers, but Kare suspects it has more to do with Alex than anything else. She sighs,  _  just when she thought they were getting somewhere. _

“That makes sense,” Chase says. 

Kare blinks in surprise and turns back to him. “What?” 

“You and Nico,” he explains with a shrug. “It really explains a lot when I think about it.” 

“It doesn’t freak you out?” 

He frowns. “What are you talking about?” 

“The whole same-sex…,” she pauses on the word, “...the whole lesbian thing?” 

Chase blinks at her, face blank of recognition. 

Kare sighs. He’s going to make her explain this whole thing, isn’t he? “Same sex couples aren’t exactly accepted by society.” 

Chase frowns. “What are you talking about? Soulmates are soulmates.” 

It’s so simplistic, the child-like conviction he has that matching marks on the skin are enough. Karolina shakes her head. She would have thought that too if she hadn’t started to think about it. Once she realized she might like girls, she’d tried to think of same sex couples she knew. The only one she could think of was the hairdresser on one of her father’s recent movies.  

“Society doesn’t think that way,” Kare whispers, twisting her bracelet around her wrist. When had she developed that nervous tick? “How many same sex couple do you know? How many soulmates? The only same sex couple I know aren’t soulmates, which Antonio told me was the only way they were accepted, because both their  _ female _ soulmates died.” 

Antonio had made her come with him to get coffee away from the set when she had started asking questions, and he and his partner, Derek, had taken her under their wings, had lovingly called her ‘Baby Gay’ until someone assaulted Derek and they had to move away. That was when she had to resort to internet sites and horrifying stories told by survivors about governments intervening when it came to same sex matches, about secret “reconditioning” camps. She liked to think that most of those just happened in other countries, that as appalling as it was, it wouldn’t happen to her. 

It always fell flat. 

Because if it could happen elsewhere, it could happen to her. 

But none of that mattered when it was just her and Nico hanging out. It was like the rest of the world disappeared and everything was right.  

“Then it’s a good thing we’re running away.” Chase stands, brushing his pants off as he stands up. “I mean, who cares about what society thinks when we’re on the run.” 

Kare shakes her head with a watery laugh. “We’re not on the run.” 

“We’re accusing our parents of murder. What did you think was going to happen?” 

She hadn’t really thought much beyond the whole our-parents-are-murders thing. “I don’t know. That we’d go into child protective services?” 

He shakes his head. “I’m eighteen. You, Nico, Alex, and Gert might go to into foster care, but you’re all old enough to become independents. Molly would probably go to her aunt.” 

Karolina closes her eyes, trying to wrap her mind around the new facts. There’s no way they win. Their lives are uprooted no matter what they do. They’ll be called to witness against their parents. They can’t continue living with murderers. But if they run… “We can’t run. We have to testify.” 

Chase frowns. “You’re right.” He drops back to the ground beside her. “Fuck.” 

“Look on the bright side: if Gert’s your soulmate, they won’t really separate you.” Kare purses her lips. It’s not quite the same for her. She has no other relatives. If she didn’t have her parents, she didn’t have anyone but her friends. “Well, this has been depressing.” 

Chase groans. “It feels like this gets worse the more we talk about it.” 

“Hey! We’re making the call now!” Alex shouts. 

Karolina hauls herself up to her feet. Problematic or not, it’s time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! And for your patience in updates, I've had a couple of inquiries about updates...unfortunately, I do not have any planned updates. I'm making this thing up as I go along and writing keeps happening in bursts. It'll be updated as I go. 
> 
> No beta. All mistakes are mine. Hopefully this chapter wasn't too all-over-the-place. Let me know what you thought! <3


	4. A Phone Call and a Freak Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They make a phone call, and then they make a plan.

**Chapter 4**

Alex looks around the group nervously as the dial tone rings in his ears. They’re being transferred to Homicide. This really is it. No backing out now. As soon as this call goes through, their parents will officially be murder suspects.

Gert is the only one who meets his eyes with confidence and conviction, or rather she looks determined. She’s still fiddling nervously with the edge of her sleeve, but she still nods to him in support. He’d looked to Nico first, but she was nervously kicking the pavement.

“ _Homicide two, Los Angeles Police Department._ ”

Oh, God, he’d forgotten that he’d be talking to an actual person! “Uh, hi. Hello, I’d like to report a murder. Well, not _like_ but I did, well, we witnessed a murder.” He winces at the flubbed delivery along with the rest of their group. Nico’s hand lands on his arm and she squeezes gently.

Alex takes a deep breath to calm himself.

_“Slow down, son. Now tell me what happened.”_

Right. Slow down. Go through this one point at a time, Wilder. “It’s a bit...complicated. It wasn’t just a murder. We’re not talking gangbangers and a drive by.”

_“So what are we talking about?”_

He’s babbling too much. “My parents. All our parents,” he adds, making eye contact with Nico and then Gert. “They’re...well, they’re Pride.” That name has a lot of weight around here. “They’re not who they say they are. There was some sort of ritual sacrifi-”

_“Hahahaha! Nice try, kid,_ ” the detective says through guffaws. “ _But we can’t just go locking up your parents because they gave you a curfew_.”

“No! I’m serious,” Alex interjects. “We have evidence.”

“ _What? Some photoshop?”_

“We have a video of them stabbing some poor girl!”

The laughter fades from the detective’s voice. “ _Alright, listen, I don’t have time to deal with some hoax, alright, son. If this is real evidence, I’ll need you to bring the original video down to the police station so our techs can get a look at it, verify it._ ”

Alex nods. “Right. We can do that.”

_“Alright. Now what’s your name, kid?”_

“Alex Wilder.”

“ _Wilder? As in Geoffrey Wilder? Are you pranking your dad?_ ” There’s another chuckle. “ _No, wait. He put you up to this, didn’t he? Well, you can tell him I’m not falling for it. This was a good one though. Really had me going. Gotta get back to work now. Tell your dad I said hi._ ”

_Click_.

Alex pulls the phone away from his ear and stares at it in astonishment.

He blinks and looks up at the rest of the group, unsure what to do now.

“Did he just…” Nico appears to have lost the ability to speak.  

“He thought it was a prank,” Alex says quietly, still absorbing the words himself.

“So what do we do now?” Karolina asks. “If the police don’t believe us…”

“We send the video out,” Gert announces, always the voice of reason. She glares at them all. “We have proof, photographic evidence of our parents killing a woman in cold blood. If the police don’t want to listen, then we send it out to everyone we can. Get it on the morning news. We can’t just sit on this.”

Alex nods. “Yeah. Right. Let’s send this sucker out.” He pulls the laptop closer and starts searching for the local television networks and their tiplines. By the time he had three emails, his phone is starting to ring. He pulls it out to check the caller ID and freezes as his dad’s face stares back at him.

“Oh, shit.”

“What?” Nico asks, leaning over his shoulder. “Oh…”

“Should I answer?” He glances around, panicked.

“Hell, no,” Gert says as Karolina responds: “Do it!”

Alex lifts his phone to his ear and struggles to sound unaffected as he says “hey, Dad.”

_“Alex, where are you?”_

“Uh,” he glances around in a panic. “ _Hanging out with Nico.”_ He pleads with her to go along with this as much as he can will his eyes until she offers a “Hi, Mr. Wilder” in the general direction of his phone.

“ _I thought you’d gone to bed_ ,” his dad says, voice hard.

Yup. This is definitely not good. “You didn’t hear me when I left? Nico and I actually had a project to work on...Astronomy. _”_ He shrugs at the looks he gets from the group. There’s not much else he can say. It’s too late at night to be anything normal. At least the observatory will make sense then if his parents try to track his phone.

“ _I didn’t realize you were taking astronomy._ ”

Alex laughs, hoping it doesn’t sound too strained or like he’s lying. “Yeah! It’s one of my electives. Nico and I thought it would be fun. Anyway...I’ll be home in about half an hour. See you then.”

“ _Alight, drive safe. When you get home, we’re going to need to talk about sneaking out._ ”

He winces as he turns off his phone. He doesn’t just hang up.  He shuts it down completely and stares at the computer. “They know.”

“What?” Chase asks.

“They know. The police must have called my dad. Why else would they call looking for me?” Obviously. And if his parents know, it won’t be long until they all know. As soon as he fails to come home, their parents will no doubt start calling around. If all their parents haven’t been informed yet, they will be within the hour. “We need to go. Now.”

“Go? Go where?” Nico demands, arms crossed defensively over her chest. “We should just go home, talk to our parents, play it off as a joke if they ask. Did your dad actually say anything about the police?”

Alex wants to reach out, to grab her and convince her that there was no other reason for his dad to call him, but Karolina’s already got an arm wrapped around her, exchanging glances with Gert and Chase, both of whom appear to already be on the same page. Molly’s the only one who looks lost.

“We’ll figure this out,” Karolina says soothingly, her eyes drifting over the rest of the crowd. “Right? I mean, they can’t know. Can they?”

Oh, he wants to protest that. The last time he and Amy thought their parents knew something was up, he woke up to his soulmark burning before it scarred over. In the morning, he learned that Amy was dead, that his soulmate had been the older girl he played video games with. Somehow his parents know, which means all their parents know. “They know.”

Gert frowns at him and turns to the group. “I agree with Alex. Even if we can’t be sure they know, we can’t just do nothing. No one wants to go home and live with murderers like nothing happened.”

“So, what? We run away?” Nico throws back, voice growing increasingly hysterical as she goes on.

“We can’t go home to a bunch of murderers.” Chase declares. “So first, we’re going to need somewhere to crash. My van could probably work short term.”

“A place to crash? Your van?” Alex repeats, wishing he could smack some smarts into Chase. That he wasn’t so quick to jump. “And what happens when our parents start looking for us? I thought we would have at least a twelve-hour head start, but now we only have an hour.”

Gert holds her hands up. “Alright, cool it, the two of you. We haven’t decided we’re running yet. Some of us are not prepared to run.”

Alex glares at Gert, the one person he had expected to be a voice of reason. “I’m not prepared to run either, but its not like we can go home.”

“Well some of us have things like anxiety meds that we need,” Gert shoots back.

“She’s got a point,” Chase counters reluctantly with a shrug for Alex that just rubs him the wrong way. “Whatever we’re going to do, we have to move quickly. Before your parents call the rest of our parents. We can’t go to everyone’s house.” For extra measure, he rounds on Alex, “Also, my van is the perfect getaway car. They’re used by all sorts of blue collar professionals – electricians, plumbers, cable guys. There are so many of them on the road that it’s hard to spot specific ones, so it’s at least stealthier than Gert’s dinosaur, no offense. And it’s less pretentious than your silver Prius.”

Alex scowls.

Gert shrugs. “None taken. Although I’d prefer that we get out of here first.” She glances around them. “I don’t like being out in the open.”

At the suggestion, Alex can feel eyes on his back, an eerie prickle that shivers across his skin and sets him on edge. “Right. Let’s get out of here.”

…

Nico’s whole body rejects the decision, coming up with a million other responses to this choice. No. They’re not doing this. She’s not prepared. She needs to mentally prepare herself. She needs a plan, a goal, something that proves that this isn’t just an impulse decision.

She needs her favorite eyeliner. Something stable that she can cling to.

“Before we do that,” Chase interrupts and Nico almost collapses in relief. Someone will finally talk some sense into everyone. Alex and Chase get into some kind of stare-off at the interruption. She can practically feel the testosterone in the air. At least the dick-measuring contest is familiar. “Everyone turn off your phones. Take out the battery and the SIM card.”

That’s it. They’ve lost it. Nico looks around, surprised when, after a beat, reluctantly they all start to move. Gert is the first to pull out her battery and smash the SIM card. She then pulls out the memory card and shoves it in her pocket. Karolina, Alex and Molly follow suit until Nico is the only one still clutching her working phone.

“I don’t think I can do this. I might not get along with my mom, but she’s a rational person. And my dad…my dad couldn’t do this.” She clings to that fact, cleaves to it like it’s her last thread of sanity. And maybe it is because this all went from an I-hate-my-parents fest to a holy-shit-my-parents-are-actually-evil freak out that she is in no way prepared for.

Her mother had finally started to confide in her last week, to show her how their Wizard technology mirrored magic. She had started to let Nico in after she had closed off in response to Amy’s death. They weren’t close, but they could have gotten there.  

“Nico, we all have to go, or none of us go,” Chase says. He’s trying to be gentle. There’s kindness in his eyes, but he’s also determined. He eyes Karolina and Alex, like one of them can convince her that this is the right choice. “If you’re the only one who stays behind, they’ll make you talk.”

She shakes her head. No. Nope. That’s not helping. She kind of feels like hyperventilating now. Is it getting hard to breathe?

“Way to go, genius,” Gert quips, shoving Chase bodily out of the way to get closer to Nico. Just the normalcy of that action eases some of the tension Nico feels.

Karolina steps closer. “How about you just let me see your phone?”

Nico grips the box a little tighter in response, her eyes pleading with Karolina to not do this. Not now.

“At least let me take the battery out,” Karolina says. “I’ll hold on to it for you.”

Slowly her hands come closer and wrap around Nico’s hand. Nico releases a breath at the contact. She was never one for touching. She kept her hands to herself and liked when others did too, but Karolina’s soothing makes her question that decision. It makes her feel at home with them. She relinquishes the phone into Karolina’s possession.

“Okay. Alright. Fine. So where are we going?” She needs to focus on that, on the next steps rather than the path behind her. She’s contemplated running from home plenty in the two years since Amy’s death, but she never actually came up with a working plan.

The exchanged looks aren’t particularly comforting. Nico’s eyes land on Alex. He holds himself like a natural leader, like the kind of person who should have the answers. Him or Gert. Her eyes shift to the purple haired girl.

“We need somewhere to lay low,” Alex says slowly, “where we can figure out a plan. I might have a place my parents don’t know about.”

“Might?”

“Let’s just get out of the open,” Gert insists.  

Nico let’s the group pull her along, taking comfort from her hand still clenched in Karolina’s. She finds herself sitting in the back of Chase’s van, right next to Kare as Alex and Chase argue in the front seat.

This isn’t going to work. They’re going to get caught and their parents are going to do something terrible. Well, something…she’s not sure. Their parents wouldn’t _kill_ them, would they? They might be murders but they were their parents.

She leans into Karolina as the car sways too and fro. She can’t keep track of where they’re going, and she really doesn’t want to. Suddenly everything she’s ever wanted seems to far away. All she’s got is here in this car, and her soul is suspiciously content with this chain of events.

It almost makes her wonder if her soulmate isn’t in this car.

And she’s got a sneaking suspicion she doesn’t want it to be Alex.

…

“Hey, Gert?” 

She looks away from the road and Chase’s van to glance at her sister. “Hmm?”

“Do you think Stacey and Dale are really evil?”

Gert frowns. That’s her sister. Asking the hard questions that Gert hates to answer. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “If I hadn’t seen them kill someone myself, I wouldn’t believe it.”

“You saw them?”

This was why she hadn’t wanted anyone else in the car with her and Molly. Chase was the only other person she would really want to be privy to this conversation and he had his own car to drive. “Yeah. Chase and I saw them a year ago.”

“Did you know my aunt doesn’t trust them either?” Molly says, playing with the ears on her cat hat.

That surprised Gert. “She doesn’t?”

“Nope.” Molly doesn’t elaborate, just turns her focus to the air vents in front of her. “So you and Chase saw them?”

Gert nods.

“What were the two of you doing?”

Oh, no. She doesn’t not like the teasing tone in Molly’s voice. Against her will, her face flushes, cheeks growing hot and red. She doesn’t need to look in a mirror to know that Molly’s caught on to something. “Nothing. We were just…exploring.”

“Exploring, huh? Is that what you call it?” Molly leans closer, teasing now.

Gertrude would be more annoyed if she wasn’t aware how it pulled Molly’s attention from the more pressing issue of their parents being murders. She’ll let the girl laugh at her expense. “We didn’t do anything. We were just going to talk.”

Molly frowns. “Wait. Is this why you guys started avoiding each other?”

Gert grimaces. Molly was always able to see right through her. “Maybe. It was a little hard to reconcile after that.”

“But you’re soulmates!”

“Molls, I don’t know we’re soulmates.”

“Just because you haven’t seen his mark doesn’t mean you don’t _know_ ,” Molly stressed. “You know. Deep down. You know his mark is going to match yours.”

Gert shifts uncomfortably. Just the idea fills her with bubbly pleasure. She can’t deny that it feels right, but she’s more of a logic person than a sentimental person. “Can we talk about something else?”

Molly grins and leans back in her seat with a confidence that only comes with knowing that she’s right. “Fine. How about we talk about what we’re going to do about our parents?”

“That’s the real question,” Gert muses out loud. “They’ve clearly got the police in their pockets and PRIDE basically runs Los Angeles. We’d have to get help from outside.”

“Like the Avengers?” Molly hops up in her seat, the drastic change from bored to excited jolting at this late hour.

Gert changes lanes to follow Chase as he makes a crazy left turn that leaves her heart racing as she barely avoids a collision with oncoming traffic. “What is this idiot doing?” she mutters.

“So we’re calling the Avengers?” Molly is not one to be deterred.

It’s a great question. “Probably,” Gert admits. We need to get someone to investigate and we’ve got about the same chance of the Avengers listening to us as the FBI, but we’ve got to talk to the rest of the group.”

“How cool would it be if Wolverine showed up? Or Iron Man? Oh! Or Captain America!”

The chances of the Avengers showing up are highly unlikely, despite the mystical aspect of their parent’s ritualistic killings. The fact that they haven’t been caught yet shows that they’re careful, methodical. They don’t leave bodies that can be traced back to them. If they’ve been doing this for as long as PRIDE’s been around, they’ve been at this for about twenty years. With monthly PRIDE meetings…that’s a lot of dead bodies. And somewhere along the way, they also do charity work.

They might never get someone to look into this.

But if it makes Molly feel better, they can focus on the fact that the Avengers might show up.

“Hey, Gert?”

She nods, taking another turn too fast because Chase can’t bother using a blinker like a normal person. “Yeah?”

“Has your body ever done something weird?”

“Something weird?” She repeats.

“Yeah, like my body hurts all over, and I’ve started bleeding…”

Gert accidentally slams on the brake before she completely registers the movement. “What?”

“From my nose,” Molly elaborates. “And I may have lifted a car while I was staying with my aunt.”

“A car? Really, Molly. That’s kind of an exaggeration.” There’s no way she could lift a car.

“No,” Molly insists. “It was a car. There was a cat and there were these three boys torturing it, so I told them to get away. I shoved one away and he like flew through the air. And then I had to coax the cat out-“

“That’s great, Mols. Stand up for those who can’t defend themselves.” Gert smiles at her.

Molly huffs and crosses her arms, slipping down into the seat as she mutters under her breath something that Gert doesn’t quite hear. Gert chooses to let it slide. They’ve reached their destination apparently.

The parking lot looks sketchy. They’re on the opposite side of town from where they all live, in the secluded back parking lot a pawn shop that is miraculously still open, under a streetlight whose dim, flickering light doesn’t even make it to the ground.

“Well, doesn’t this dump look sketchtastic,” Gert grumbles as she parks the car.

“Hey, your boyfriend is the one who led us here.” Molly sticks out her tongue at Gert’s scandalized silence before she makes a quick getaway and Gert swipes at empty space.

Gert sighs as she climbs from the car and looks around. She meets Chase’s eyes and he shrugs. “We can’t be seen from the road, and Sal doesn’t have any cameras.”

“Do I want to know how you know Sal?” She asks as they round the van to where the rest of the group is standing.

Chase grins at her and taps the hood of his car. “He sold me Old Bess, here.”

How can his stupid, proud grin both make her warm inside and make her want to smack him upside the head? “So?”

“So, I figure we can sell your car, warn him to keep it on the down low for awhile and also figure out where to go from here.”

Gert nods. “It’s a good plan, but…” She looks around at the group and back at Chase. “Who needs to go back to their house?” She holds up her hand as she asks the question and Nico follows suit. She points to Alex and Karolina. “You sure?”

Alex shakes his head. “If I go home now, my parents are going to catch me, which is the opposite of what we want.”

Kare shrugs. “Anything I need I can pick up at a thrift store.”

Gert nods. “Alright then. We need to split up. Molly and I will go to our place, get my meds and pack a couple bags, grab what cash we can. The rest of you go to Nico’s-“

“I’ll come with you guys,” Chase interrupts.

Gert rolls her eyes as Molly covers her mouth to contain a giggle. “You need to drive Old Bess, Jock Brain.” It’s sweet he wants to go with her, but they need to be logical right now.

Chase tosses his keys to Karolina, who fumbles a catch. “There. Problem solved. I think it’s better to split into threes anyway. So you, me and Bruiser will check out the Yorkes house, and Computer Nerd, Kare, and Nico will brave the Minoru household. Meet back here in…” He checks his watch, “thirty minutes?”

As much as she wants to pick apart Chase’s plan, to admonish him for giving up his car to come with her and Molly, Gert finds she can’t complain with his logic. Two teams of three make sense. It’s easier to explain than a group of four at the Minoru’s house, which honestly has the bigger potential of somehow going wrong, what with all the technology at their house.

She takes a deep breath as they split and another pause as she stands beside the driver’s side door. Chase’s hand slips into hers and she stares at their intertwined fingers. He’s so close that she can feel him pressed up against her side as he squeezes her hand. Her mark thrums along with his warmth, a reassuring presence. Chase doesn’t speak. It’s just a moment, a blip to the outside world, but it steels Gert for what they’re about to do and gives her the strength to open her car door with renewed confidence.

They can do this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, OH MY GOODNESS GUYS! I just wanted to take a moment to say THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING! The response to this fic has been astounding! I love you all! <3 I hope you liked this latest installment. I experimented with an Alex point of view and I'd love to hear what you think about what's happening now. Don't worry, I'm getting back to the soulmarks next chapter, and we're going to get some more shippy moments. 
> 
> Again, thank you so much for reading!! Comments, kudos, and bookmarks are always appreciated! And if you wanna find more of my crazy self, you can also fine me on tumblr: [here](http://writewithurheart.tumblr.com/)


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

“Well, my parents are obviously still awake.” Nico leans forward so she can look up at her house through the windshield. Karolina watches as she plays with the rings on her fingers. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Karolina feels just as torn as she looks up at the building. She reaches up and rests her hands on Nico’s so she stops worrying her hands. “It goes with your cover story. If Alex’s parents have called yours, you can still claim it was an astronomy project.” She wishes she could be the one to go in, but logically she knows that’s not smart. “I’ll be waiting right outside if you need me.”

Nico stares blankly ahead.

“What...what if they see Chase’s car?” Nico asks suddenly, turning back to Karolina.

Kare’s heart is in her throat when Nico looks to her for answers. Imaginary or not, she swears she can feel a flutter of Nico’s worry from the mark on her hip. Instead of dwelling on it, she squeezes Nico’s hand again. “I’ll think of something.” She glances at Alex. “You guys should go now. Before we run out of time.”

Nervous energy radiates off Alex and Nico as they exit the van, the majority of it stemming from Nico. Karolina slips into the driver’s seat so she has a better view when Alex and Nico climb the steps and walk through the front door of the Minoru’s house.

After that, all she can do is wait.

Karolina falls back against the seat, twisting her medical bracelet round and round her wrist. Allergic to Bee Stings, it says. She looks at the etched words on the metal tag. Just in case. That was what her parents always claimed whenever she asked. Apparently, she had been stung when she was a child and it had been bad.

_ That’s not fair _ , Kare reprimands herself, dropping the bracelet like it burned her.  _ You don’t know if Mom and Dad lied about your allergies. Why would that do that? _

Ultimately there’s no reason they would. She’s just being paranoid. She knows her parents love her more than anything.

She picks at a tear in the knee of her jeans, sifts through the papers Chase left on his dashboard, contemplates turning on the car so she can listen to the radio, reties her sneakers, dusts off the steering wheel, and then groans in annoyance because how much time has passed?

None.

No time has passed.

It’s been two minutes and already she would kill to have her phone in her hand, something – anything – to distract her from the fact that her soulmate is facing her murderous parents just a hundred yards away.

She glances into the back of the van and contemplates if she’s brave enough to explore Chase’s van. She’s both intrigued as to what she may find and terrified as to what she might accidentally find. Teenage boys are basically aliens, right? Does she want to know what’s back here?

Probably not.

Just when she decides she needs to work on some non-electronic related distractions, Karolina hears it:

_ CRASH. _

…

Nico’s hands shake on the door as she eases it open, glancing around her. She releases a sigh of relief when her parents aren’t in the foyer waiting for her with stern expressions as she expected them to be. She steps all the way inside.

“Welcome home, Nico,” the Wizard system greets.

Through force of habit, Nico takes off her shoes in the entry way. “Hey, Wizard. Where are my parents?”

If she can avoid them, that would be stellar. She doesn’t know if she can hold it together if they started an interrogation into her whereabouts. Her fingers start to play with her rings, stilling as she remembers Karolina’s soothing hand on her own. Just the memory loosens the tension in her limbs.

“Your parents are in their room,” the house answers. “Shall I alert them to your presence?”

“No, thank you, Wizard,” Nico says, stepping out onto the wood floor and moving toward the back of her house, thankful her room is on the other side of the house from her parents. Alex slinks behind her, shoes in hand as his eyes bounce from shadow to shadow in agitated awareness, as if he needs to be hypervigilant.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, but it’s upsetting Nico’s nerves again, which she really does need right now.

“Can you chill?” she asks, voice curt, curter than the situation warrants. They’d been flirting hours ago and now annoyance flares in her. Nico shakes her head. It’s the little things she’s noticing now, the tiny irksome habits she previously dismissed, things that would be inconsequential if they were soulmates: his heavy breathing, the way he constantly presses his glasses up, how he just assumes he’s the smartest person in a room…

Why did she ever think he might be her soulmate?

It seems ridiculous now.

On light feet, Nico slips into her room and turns on her bedside lamp. She drops to the floor and reaches under her bed to grab Amy’s backpack. It’s been sitting there for almost two years: an old diary, her phone, wallet, and laptop. Nico hasn’t had the heart to open it, not since she found her sister dead of an apparent suicide.

That’s why she had to come home. Because this might have something to do with what’s going on now.

Alex turns away from the door. He frowns as his eyes land on the brightly colored bag. “Is that-“

“Amy’s? Yeah.” Nico stuffs some extra underwear and a change of clothes into the bag. She throws the bag over her shoulder. Her eyes drift around the room for what might be the last time. It hurts more than she thought it would, like a physical blow to her chest that captures the breath in her lungs.

The silence of the house gains a physical presence as she and Alex move across the room to the door. Each shadow solidifies in the corner of her eye into a threatening figure, each shape darker than the last. The monsters of her mind manifest in the darkness, as if her demons could chase her out of the house. The need to run grows, pulses like a balloon filling with air that she’s trying not to pop.

Halfway to the door – to freedom – Nico pauses. The hallway branches out before her: straight forward to the front door, left to her parent’s room, right to the kitchen and her mother’s office. There’s light that leaks from under door, seeps down the floor like creeping fingers.

“Nico, we gotta go,” Alex whispers through gritted teeth, tugging her arm.

Before she can rethink her choice, Nico yanks her arm away. Alex stumbles after her, whispered warnings as he tries to catch her. Her footsteps are drowned out under the pounding beat of her heart.

The temperature drops as Nico steps over the threshold into her mother’s office, which seems fitting with the realization that her parents might be cold-blooded killers. The office is pristine, all clean lines and stark profiles in the light of the full moon outside. She runs her hand a framed picture of their family, even if the figures aren’t visible in the low light.

She knows the image well enough. They look like a happy family in the picture, all smiles and laughter, but Nico doesn’t know if they were ever really happy together. She lays the picture face down on the filing cabinet and turns her attention to the shadowbox on the wall.

Carefully, reverently, she opens it and grasps the hanging staff.

The prick of her finger that causes the staff to elongate hurts less with each time. She contemplates it for a moment and then turns back to the door. “Alright, now we can go.” She brushes past him to head back to the door.

“Nico?”

The light flicks on in blinding surprise, the kind that manifests a headache instantaneously. She doesn’t have time to stow the magic staff (or whatever fancy name her mother uses) before she blinks back spots to see her parents both staring her and Alex down.

“What are you doing?” Tina asks.

Nico’s words are swallowed up in the moment, drowned in a sudden anger at her parents for trying to lock her out of everything. They have a cover story, a reason for them to be here. She just can’t think of it here.

“We were doing an astronomy project,” Alex cuts in, stepping forward with a smile. His hand lands on Nico’s back and it takes all of her control not to pull away from the contact.

“Astronomy? You’re not taking astronomy.” Nico scowls at her father. She didn’t realize he was so familiar with her class schedule.

“What are you doing with the Staff of One?” Tina demands, eyes fixed on the magic stick in Nico’s hand.

Nico glances at the stick and back at her mother. “I just wanted to show it to Alex.”

Tina’s cold eyes wander to Alex Wilder, and if possible grow even colder. “I think it’s time for you to go, Mr. Wilder. I know you were devastated by Amy’s death, but I don’t approve of you trying to replace your soulmate with my daughter.”

Nico freezes. “What?”

“Alex and Amy were soulmates,” Tina says in a cold, clipped tone. Her eyes then flit to Nico with the stone-cold knowledge that she’s providing new information. How is her mother worse than every mean girl she’s ever interacted with in high school? “He told you that right?”

“No, but I already knew he wasn’t my soulmate.” So that’s a lie, but her anger is steering right now, not her logic. Her mom doesn’t get to win this round. “What I never knew was that you guys were part of a murder club. Seems like we’re all learning stuff tonight.”

Her mother blinks, a flicker of movement which is the only sign that she’s surprised by Nico’s attack. Her father on the other hand stumbles back a step and pales, a mask of horror in place that he can’t fight. Nico sees it, and she knows the truth. What they saw tonight wasn’t a lie it was the truth.

She raises the Staff in front of her to ward off her parents. “We’re leaving now and if you try to stop us, I will turn you into frogs.”

“Don’t make empty threats, dear. It’s unbecoming.” Tina holds her hand out toward the Staff.

The stick wiggles in Nico’s hand, pulling at her fingers as it jerks her arm forward. She holds her ground and yanks the staff backwards. With a deep breath, she points the head of the spear toward her parents and visualizes a giant gust of wind throwing them backwards as she shouts: “TORNADO!”

Air whistles past Nico. Her hair flails around her face, brushing the back of her neck and slapping her in the face. Her clothes whip around her and the backpack swings off her shoulder and slaps her in the side. She squeezes her eyes shut until  the burst of air dies. 

The destruction that meets her eyes, scares the shit out of her. Half of her parents’ house is gone, obliterated in the blink of an eye. Splinters of wood and particles of dust hang in the air, almost suspended if she didn’t look close enough to see them slowly floating to the  ground. The house in front of her is virtually levelled to the ground, or it probably would be if not for the scary around of concrete her parents put into this house. The frame just barely stands and the roof has been decimated. Nico can quite literally see the stars in the night sky through the hole she just created. 

She releases the Staff in her hand, terrified of what else her mind can conjure. When she held it and created snow, it had been harmless. Now, with words behind the thought, the effects were a terror to behold. 

“HOLY SHIT!” Alex’s voice is suddenly and glaringly loud in her ears. They break a dam inside her and all her shock releases a torrent of emotion. 

“Oh my god!” Nico stumbles back a step. “Did I just...Did I just kill my parents?” 

She spins to Alex, fully prepared to scream at him because THIS DID NOT JUST HAPPEN! THIS WAS NOT REAL! Instead she screams again,  because the magic staff that just  _ destroyed half of  her house _ is now STICKING OUT OF HER CHEST! 

Before their eyes, the staff sinks into Nico’s chest. There’s no pain, just an odd pressure that manages to only feel vaguely uncomfortable. It wouldn’t be that scary, except for the small detail of it  _ disappearing into her body _ . 

Alex must share her opinion because his eyes are bugged out of his face. 

“Nico-” 

At her mother’s voice, Nico screams again and spins back around. This is the dirtiest she’s ever seen her mother. Tina Minoru is covered with a layer of dirt that clings to her, her typically immaculate hair a veritable birds’ nest, and her clothes are torn and smudged. But she is very much not dead as she stares down her daughter. 

“Nico, give me the staff!” 

_ That’s _ what her mother’s fixated on? The  _ staff? _ “Well, that’s going to be a little hard, Mother Dearest,” she snaps back, even as Alex tugs on her arm. 

“Come on, Nico. We need to get out of here.” 

She let’s Alex drag her out the space where the front door used to be, feeling a mix of sorrow and satisfaction at how her mother can’t get past the debris to follow them as they escape.  Sorrow because this is her family and her home. Satisfaction because that place had become a living reminder of her dead sister. And yeah, sometimes it just felt good to destroy things. 

They clamour into Chase’s van as Karolina turns the key and peels away from the curb.  

“What the hell just happened?” Karolina finally asks when they’ve turned two corners and she’s slowed down a hair so they won’t get pulled over, especially not when an ambulance and a police car fly past them in the opposite direction, probably headed for Nico’s house. 

Nico catches her breath from the passenger’s seat as she turns to Karolina with a deep breath. Any words she might have used stick in her throat and it feels like she’s looking at Kare for the first time in her life.  

How the hell hadn’t she realized it before? 

Nico’s heart speeds up as Kare’s worried blue eyes dart between Nico’s face and the roads. Those eyes...they’re riveting, a combination of a crystal blue ocean and a cloudless sky. Not to speak of the emotion in her face because Karolina just feels with every fiber of her being and Nico really  needs her to not be driving right now because God damn it she just wants to kiss her right now, to kiss her and not stop until the world ends. 

It hits Nico like a train, a train that’s  been barrelling at  her at full speed that she just realized was right on top of her. It should hurt like hell, the impact should break every part of her body, but instead it just makes her feel whole, complete. 

Her world is falling apart, but that’s okay.

_ Karolina Dean is her soulmate _ . 

Everything is going to be alright. 

… 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovely readers! 
> 
> I know it's been awhile, but I just got stuck. And I know this is a slightly shorter chapter, but a lot happens. I figured this was a good stopping point and we'll check in with Gert, Chase and Molly next chapter, which will be equally as long (if not longer). I hope you enjoyed this Deanoru chapter. As always, PLEASE let me know what you thought. Comments, Kudos, and Bookmarks are ALWAYS appreciated. 
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH for reading! (and for waiting so long for an update) You are all amazing! <3 
> 
> Nicole


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all you lovely readers! 
> 
> So it's been a while, but I'm back! I'm a little rusty and I've got no beta so all mistakes are completely and totally mine. I hope you enjoy! And for those who celebrate consider this a Christmas present! For those who don't, here's wishing you a happy new year! 
> 
> Happy reading!

**Chapter 6**

The Yorke house is dark. Gert cut the headlights as soon as her car pulled into the driveway, inching along until the equally dark house looms up. There’s just enough clutter around, and the gardens are just overgrown enough that the place could be abandoned.  

“Alright,” Gert whispers as she shifts the car into park, staring up at the house. “Here’s the plan, go in, grab clothes, meds, some food, and get out. Meet back here in ten.” She twists back to look at Chase. “Keep the car running.” 

“Sure you don’t want me to join you?” Chase asks as they climb out, hopping over the console to take Gert’s place in the driver’s seat. 

She looks away from the comfort of his eyes to the dark house, taking another deep breath. She can already feel the impending anxiety. They’ve had a whole year for her to adjust. She no longer jumps when left alone in a room with her parents. She’s been prepared for this. Her bag is still packed in her room, including meds and mostly clean clothes. “Yeah. You should stay out here for when we need to make a quick getaway.” 

Although she can read the reluctance in the way his hands clench on the steering wheel as he adjusts in the seat, Chase accepts the statement with determination. There’s not another warning to be careful or any posturing. She’s thankful for that.

Molly yawns as she walks with altogether too much nonchalance to the house. Gert fights the urge to shush her as she crosses the porch and opens the door. They part ways at the top of the stairs. Molly’s room is farther from Dale and Stacy, a fact Gert reminds herself of as Molly flicks her light on and starts to move around heavily, movements laden and sleep-clumsy. 

Gert quickly checks her own bag and throws it over her shoulder. She reenters Molly’s room to find her sitting on the edge of her bed, stifling a yawn, eyes barely open. 

“Come on, Molly. We’ve got to move. Is this your bag?” It an absurdly pink monstrosity, covered with cutesy pictures. It’s also overflowing with things that don’t look remotely practical but completely Molly. 

Gert clicks the case closed and grabs Molly’s hand. “Vamanos.” 

They reach the bottom of the stairs and Gert detours to the kitchen. She takes three reusable, environmentally-friendly bags from the hook beside the door and starts filling them with all the vegetarian food she and Molly likes. Through her exhaustion, Molly makes a face. 

“Are we still going to have to eat all this stuff?” 

Gert pauses with her hand on a the fresh kale. “Well, it’s better than nothing. And who knows when we’ll be able to get fresh vegetables again.” 

“Why don’t we just grab some of Dale and Stacey’s plants from the lab?” 

She stills. They’re not supposed to go down into the lab without Dale or Stacey. That’s where they work on their nutrient-rich plant hybrids. Not the most delicious, but Molly has a point. In for a penny, in for a pound, then. 

“Take the bags out to the car. Tell Chase I’ll be there in five. Got it?” 

Molly nods and loads herself down with bags. Her feet move with a sleepy shuffle, but Gert’s less worried now. If her parents were going to wake, it would have been while they were upstairs. At this point, they could probably blame it on jet lag and assume it’s Gert. There are some blessings in this happening now. 

Getting into the lab is simple enough. Gert can’t profess to being into the biological engineering her parents practice, but she knows how to gain access to their labs, even if she is too much of a goody-two-shoes to make use of it. 

The lab is eerily quiet as she shifts through the plants, reading Dale and Stacey’s carefully detailed labels. Will a group of runaway teens eat their vegetables? Probably not, but with Karolina’s vegan-ness, and her affinity for eating her parents ultra-healthy concoctions, they would probably eat a bunch of it wherever they ended up. 

She sets aside as many pots as she can carry and starts to look around to see what else might be hiding down here that can be useful. Logic tells her to take the plants and run, that any extra time spent is another minute she could get caught. The curious part of her brain compels her onward, the hint of whisper that there’s something more just around the corner. 

It’s the part she blames Chase for. She wouldn’t call herself particularly brave or adventurous. She likes rules and justice and fighting for what’s right, but she likes to do it in the open and above board. Exploring her parents’ lab on her own? Not really up her alley. 

Her mark burns with comforting warmth as she turns the corner into the back of the lab, a warm bubbling reminder that it still exists. Gert frowns as the plants on the work tables are traded out for tools and then older looking relics. The lab starts to resemble a antiques shop. How far does this basement go anyway? 

“Gert?” 

“Dios! Chase, you scared the daylights out of me. What are you doing here?” 

He moves to join her, a hand naturally landing on the small of her back and rubbing in soothing circles. “Molly said you were down here and might need some help. What are grabbing?” He picks up an old fashioned looking saw from what appears to be an amputation set from what has to be the 1700s in remarkably good condition. “What is this stuff anyway? Doesn’t seem very scientific.” 

Gert shrugs. “No idea.” She picks up an ornate telescope that looks like it should be in a museum, returns it, and runs her hand over the spines of several books that look to be first editions. Everything is undeniably old and in far too pristine condition. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say Dale and Stacey plucked this right of Macciavelli’s desk,” she mutters as she picks up a copy of The Prince in the original Italian. 

“You sure they didn’t?” Chase asks, of course fascinated by an ancient Colt revolver. 

Movement in the corner of her eye distracts Gert from her answer. There, partially hidden behind ornate wood chairs is a large metal door with a keypad beside it. Even on her tiptoes, Gert is too short to get a look, so she pokes at the keypad. The screen lights up when she pokes it, a handprint scanner. 

Seizing her newfound reckless streak, Gert places her hand on the scanner. 

“Gert!” Chase races over and yanks her hand from the device. “What if that sets off an alarm? Do you want your parents to find us?” 

Her entire body buzzes with awareness at the skin on skin contact. It hinders her higher brain function with the rush of giddiness at the nearness of her soulmate. Or her crush. Who she’s fairly certain is her soulmate. But the moment is ruined as the door opens with a hiss of equalizing pressure and a hologram springs to life in front of them. 

It takes her a minute to see through the steampunk goggles and grease smears to Dale and Stacey disguised underneath. It’s the cloud of red curls and her father’s iconic mustache that give up the game. She’s only seen them dressed up like this on the yearly Renaissance Faire visits. 

“Our darling, Gertrude, not to be melodramatic, but you’re watching this, then your mother and I are dead.” 

Gert’s hand digs into Chase’s arm, stumbling back a step as a creature emerges from the now-open door and comes to a stop beside the hologram of her parents. WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?!? 

“There’s so much to tell you, sweetheart. If you’re here, then you’ve found the Codex we keep on the work bench. We can’t be sure how we died, but we know you need protection, which is where your  Deinonychus  comes in. She’s been telepathically linked to you and designed to listen to your commands. She’ll protect you.” Her mother wrings her hands with worry.

“We couldn’t leave you instructions for the time machine. It’s too dangerous to write down, but we know you can figure it out.” 

“Time machine?” Gert echoes. 

“That’s what you’re latching on to? Not the velociraptor currently staring us down?” Chase mutters, shifting uneasily. 

“Now that we’re gone, honey, it’s your job to look out for Molly. Keep her safe. You two will always have each other. Remember, we love you both, so much.” 

The hologram fizzles out, but the raptor remains. Gert steps forward, hesitantly, and the creature mirrors her movements. Chase stands frozen behind her. The warmth in her blood fades as they lose contact and she lifts her hand out towards the creature’s snout. 

“Hey, girl.” 

The creature pushes her nose, adorned with a thick iron ring, into the palm of Gert’s hand and closes her eyes. Gert smiles. It feels like affection, a hard to explain tickle of something lingers in the back of her mind. 

“It’s nice to meet you.” 

“Hate to burst your bubble, Gert, but I’m not sure a dinosaur will fit in the car.” 

The raptor’s eyes flash open and narrow in on Chase. She sniffs at him and starts to circle. Chase shifts uneasily to keep her in view until the raptor finishes her perusal and sits next to Gert again, watching him. She makes a low rumble, like a purring cat. 

“Good news, Stein. Looks like you pass muster.” Gert pulls on her big girl pants and nods. “Alright. So apparently I have a dinosaur and a time machine, and something called the Codex?” 

“That’s great, Gert, but we are kind of on a time crunch here.” 

“Right.” She doesn’t have the time to dissect this now. They need to go. Chase grabs the plants and she detours to the work bench. The mysterious Codex is a thick tome written in illegible symbols. Gert grabs it and follows after Chase. 

If she thought Molly was noisy earlier, it’s nothing compared to the noise her new guard dog makes. The coolest pet ever, she might be, but dinosaurs are not quiet. Not to mention she appears to be enjoying her newfound freedom if the movement of her tail is any indication. 

“Gertrude Yorkes!” 

“Oh shit.” Stacey’s voice doesn’t come from upstairs as she expects, but from below. Gert twists from the top of the stairs to see Dale and Stacey, decked out in the same Steampunk costume as the earlier hologram. 

“Just where are you going with that book?” 

“The book? Really, Dale? Not the  Deinonychus ?” Stacey shoots her husband an exasperated look. 

Her parents don’t seem angry. In fact, without the costume she would just think that they were the same quirky couple they had always been. It throws her for a loop. She would have expected them to be...more angry… 

“Well, you always said it would be Gert’s graduation present and I know it’s a bit early, but you can never be too safe. Obviously, she can’t take her to school, but perhaps we could start training her. You were saying she needed more exercise.” 

Gert blinks, unable to track the conversation. Instead she focuses on her parents and how they look like they just stepped out of the Victorian Era. That’s when the  _ time travel  _ of it all hits. 

“Is this some weird H. G. Wells thing? Time Machine?” She would ask more questions, but her breath is shortening with the beginning of a panic attack. 

“Oh, no, honey. Of course not. Well, maybe. We might have influenced that book. Whoops.” 

Definitely an oncoming panic attack, which her newest friend can seem to sense as she prompts Gert to pet her to take her focus off the incoming wave and anxiety. 

“We’re from the future. All of us. But the time machine broke when we landed here and well, here we are now,” Dale says with a laugh. 

He and Stacey are moving closer, which is not helping the panic, but Gert can’t move. It’s purely on autopilot that she counters with another question. 

“The future? But what about my biological mother?” 

Stacey and Dale exchanged looks. “Well, she was more a...surrogate. But legally, she’s your mother. It’s complicated and it’s late. So why don’t we put your pet back in her room and get to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.” 

Right. The morning when she’s not going to be here. “Oh, uh…” 

… 

Molly is asleep in the backseat of the car as Chase lays the potted plants down across the floor in front of her. With luck that will preserve them and the dinosaur will sit in the very back. He turns to tell Gert just that, but there’s no one behind him. 

Chase sighs and heads back to the front door. They really don’t have time for this. He thought she was right on his heels. 

“Gert?” He calls ahead of him. 

He stops at the top of the stairs and wishes he hadn’t left the damn fistigons in the car. Dale and Stacey Yorke look just as goofy as they did in the real life hologram. Their eyes open wide as they dart between him and Gert. She just looks panicked. 

Well, since he doesn’t have a weapon, talking will have to do. 

“Hey, Mr and Mrs Yorke.” 

“Chase? We didn’t realize you were here.” 

“Uh, yeah, I came over to talk to Gert about...things.” Yup, real convincing, Stein. He’s a great liar. Which is probably the worst part. All the times he’s lied to his dad about pot, and now he can’t think of a single excuse. 

“Things,” Stacey repeats slowly. 

“What kind of things?” Dale appears to be sizing him up.

“Uh…” Chase really needs to get better. 

“Soulmate things,” Gert declares suddenly. 

“Soulmates?” Stacey visibly perks up. “You two?” 

“That’s kind of what we wanted to find out. We didn’t get the chance to talk earlier,” Chase babbles. It’s not like he hadn’t imagined having this conversation before. He just didn’t want to have it in front of her parents. 

“Oh, right. Of course,” Dale says slowly, but Stacey is now frowning. She opens her mouth to ask something that will probably throw their entire alibi out the window, because let’s face it, Chase should probably be freaking out about the dinosaur. This story has too many holes in it. 

“So do you mind if I borrow Gert?” 

“Well, uh, isn’t it a little late? Can this wait until tomorrow?” 

“What? Is there a problem with me finding my soulmate now?” Gert demands. Whatever is happening now has spurred her into motion and she heads up the stairs with a determination that borders on anger, the same way she moves through the hallways without fear as she hands out flyers. “Come on. Let’s go.” 

Chase forces himself to wave over his shoulder, effecting nonchalance. Stacey gives him an enthusiastic thumbs up. Dale attempts to be menacing but it doesn’t look like they suspect anything. 

As soon as they close the  front door behind them, by tacit agreement, they break into a run and race to the car. 

“Into the back, girl,” Gert coaches her new dinosaur. Surprisingly it works and she slams the trunk as Chase twists the key in the ignition and the car roars to life. 

Gert has barely closed the door the passenger side when Chase shifts the car into drive. He races from the driveway. Only the sluggish engine stops him from leaving tire marks in his haste to get away. 

He can feel Gert thinking from her seat beside him. Her body is rigid with barely-suppressed words that he’s sure are just bursting to get out. So he waits for her to speak as he keeps strictly to the speed limit and treks across the city. 

“Is your soulmark black?” 

Her voice is so quiet it almost slips away into nothing, but Chase catches it. He turns back into the same parking lot and shifts the car back into park. His hand taps on the wheel as he contemplates what to say. 

“Do you want to do this now?” He wants to. He’s just terrified. 

She takes a deep breath and unbuckles her seatbelt to face him. “I know, it was just an excuse. I’m just curious. You know, we don’t talk about soulmarks. I just thought…” 

“It is. Black.” His courage comes in bursts, in singular words as he recalls the way his body buzzes when his skin touches Gert’s. 

She nods shakily and looks back at him. “So where is yours?” 

His hand lands involuntarily against his ribs and Gert inhales sharply. His eyes drift down to her side, right where his mark lays. She nods in silent confirmation that her mark is where he’s looking. 

“On the count of three?” She asks. 

Chase nods, unable to speak with anticipation. His hand grips the hem of his shirt. “One.” 

“Two.” 

“Three.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Kudos, Bookmarks, and Comments are greatly appreciated! 
> 
> You are all amazing! <3 - writewithurheart


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